By Mahesh Bikram Shah
He is the son of a guerrilla. I am in my office, leaning on my chair for support and watching him through the window. He is playing here and there in the courtyard and I watch his every movement with interest. Right in front of my office is a two-roomed stone house. A lock has been hung on a door and a soldier is standing in front if it, his rifle held straight and erects an alert look on his face. In this room, holding on to the windowsill for support and single-mindedly watching the child at play, is a woman. She is the mother of this child who is unaware of both our gazes, but whose activities are central to both of us. Now and again our eyes lift and meet, and I realize her already expressionless face has become further devoid of movement.
The boy is jumping, laughing and concentrating his utmost on whirling around the yard. He has not noticed any difference between the courtyard of his home in the village and the courtyard of the house in which his mother is a captive.
His fearless, sure and confident childish activities start to agitate me. This ruffian has decided our courtyard is also the property of his insurgent father, has he? Cruel emotions spring into my eyes and I begin to get the impression that this bold display of child’s play by the guerrilla’s son, right in front of me, the commander of the security forces, is somehow accomplishing the work of his father, who wants to take aim with his rife and shoot at me. I look towards the room where the insurgent’s wife is. Her eyes see only her son and it is obvious that she is more concerned about his safety than her own.
The guerrilla’s son is still fearlessly leaping about the courtyard. I start to wonder what his devil father, the commander of rebel platoon is doing. Doubtless he already knows his wife and son have fallen into our hands. His already hot blood is probably boiling now, his rough hands gripping the butt of his rifle even tighter. He is probably agitated, mumbling to himself the potential danger his wife and son are in. Maybe in his frustration he is aiming the barrel straight up into the sky and squeezing the trigger bang, bang, bang!
Sinking into my conjectures over the physical and mental condition of the insurgent, I begin searching the boy’s features for signs of the cruelty of his father. But the tranquility shown on his face is no different from that I have seen on the face of my own five year old son. In an effort to see something that might betray the cruelty of his father, I tell myself: ‘This boy is the son of guerrilla. How many of my soldiers have been killed, how many young girls have been widowed and how many children’s futures have been made darker at the hands of this man?’ Reminding myself of this reality, I am shocked to realize that playing right in my courtyard is a boy whose father would laugh loudly at the sight of our corpses submerged in a ditch of fresh blood; that this boy is the apple of that same cruel eye which wants to see our bodies dead in uniform.
My room is steamy in the scorching heat and my body is soaked through with sweat. I start to see the innate fearlessness of the boy and his ignorance of our control over him as a direct and personal challenge to me. I begin to imagine that his father is defying me through him.
I stick my head out of the window and look at the boy. My eyes glitter with cruelty, springing from the mental tension his insurgent father has inflicted upon me. I transplant my perspectives on to his child’s body, thinking how if his father discovered me unarmed like this, like a wolf preying on a deer, not an atom of his mind would hesitate to worry at me, fall violently upon my flesh with his teeth, and, after playing with me, finally kill me. If tomorrow his son became grown up, following his father’s position, he too would waste no time in taking our heads off.
The cruelty in my eyes is suffocating the insurgent’s wife inside the cell. Her face is clearly terror-stricken, and I realize that her eyes, gripped by fear, are fixed on my every movement. Also noticing the intensity of my gaze, my guard, Dhan Bahadur appears at my side. Stamping his feet on the ground and snapping off a salute, he attracts my attention and says: “Sir, I’ve noticed that the boy is aggressive.”
“Really?” I say, turning a questioning gaze to him. He looks towards the boy again and says:
“He has all the skills of his father, Sir. How to creep and crawl on the ground; how to hide himself whenever the sound of a bullet comes. I’ve seen him do it all. If we come back to the village in three or four years, it will be just like the insurgents’ forest.”
“Yes,” I said. My reply was one that feigned disinterest, but there was surprise concealed in it. The ways in which we had been looking at the boy were different. I had been searching for traces of the cruelty of his father on his young face, while my guard’s eyes saw an already developed and mature insurgent. My eyes were returning back towards the past; Dhan Bahadur’s were extending into the future. But our reactions are the same in that we are both troubled by the boy’s presence.
I am standing in the courtyard. Now he is right in front of me. Subtly, I observe him closely from head to toe. His circular head is more developed in comparison with the rest of his body. His hands and feet show signs of being strong. He wears a dirty half-sleeved shirt and shorts which have been patched in two places. His feet are bare, but thick and coarse, the skin of his elbows and knees even more so.
I look in to his eyes. He looks back at me with the easy curiosity of a child. Touching my face with his innocent eyes, he giggles, and I can no longer picture the cruel laugh of his insurgent father in this lively smile. He is laughing and I can see the smile of my own son in his face. Touching his face, I pinch his cheeks and, taking his small hand in mine, I ask: “You’re not scared here, are you?” He shakes his head and says
“No.” His eyes had become fixed on the pistol which hung at my waist. Suddenly he raised his hands, gestured towards it and said “My dad has one of those, too.”
“And what else does your father have?” My question made him serious for a moment, and then he pointed at my guard’s rifle.
“He has that too.”
“And can you remember all the things your father taught you?” He replied before I could finish the question:
“Yes, I can, I remember everything – how to hide if the enemy comes in to the village, how to sling stones at them. He taught me all of that. Shall I show you?” With this, he lay on the ground with his arms and legs outstretched and began crawling, pushing his body forward using his elbows. Reaching a little further away, he changed his posture. Now straightening one leg and then the other, he started to crawl using his hands. After going a little further, suddenly he got up and darted to some cover behind a stone wall and started to throw stones towards us, screaming “Bang! Bang!”
“The bomb explodes, and the enemy is dead,” he cackled, and I get the sensation that now there is something loathsome hidden in his laugh. Right in front of us, this child is unconsciously exhibiting the behaviors of insurgency and wartime and sending shivers down my spine. The insurgent’s wife, imprisoned in the room, did not like seeing the game her son was playing and she called loudly to him to come inside.
After the brief meeting with the insurgent’s son, I return to my room and begin to think about what legal case I should bring against the mother and child. Although according to the rules I could not begin any proceedings against the son, there is no such obstacle to taking severe steps against his mother. There is no evidence of her having taken up arms as a rebel, but if we were able to find some proof that she had worked for the insurgents as a messenger, we could easily send her to jail.
Inside the cell, the insurgent’s wife is holding her son in her lap and stroking his hair. I can hear clearly that she is talking to him, but cannot understand what she is saying in the local Kham language. Love overflows from her eyes and in her lap her son is enjoying the attention. On the face of the insurgent’s wife, who has left the safety of home and entered the jungle, concern for her son’s safety is clearly visible. She cares more about his life than her own, and is impatient and worried about the security of her husband’s family. She clasps him to her lap and wanders about the room, every now and again raising her tear-soaked eyelashes and looking at me. She has probably already guessed that I am the commander. When, at what time would I issue the sentence? What kind of punishment would she receive? How would it affect her son’s future? All of these questions are probably playing on her mind.
All of a sudden my young son swings into the courtyard, ringing the bell of his bicycle. Looking at me and smiling, and still ringing the bell, he starts to charge and whirl around the courtyard and in the corner of the cell I see something that moves me profoundly. Forgetting the loving caress of his mother, the insurgent’s son puts his hands up on the windowsill and begins to watch my son galloping round the courtyard. The ringing of the bell and the spinning of the wheels excite his child’s mind – and now, climbing down from his mother’s lap, he comes out in to the courtyard, and from its edge stares in amazement at the sight of my son on his bicycle. With the motion of its wheels, a physical change comes over his face. From this change I try to analyze his mental state, and I get the impression that the whirling of the bicycle has sparked an intense longing, and the pressure of controlling the need to fulfill it is making his muscles expand and contract.
Suddenly I see the insurgent’s son rush towards the bicycle. Hands outstretched, he tries to grab hold of it, but cannot stop the motion of the bicycle and it slips from his hands, dragging him along the ground. Sprawling, he crawls and tries to grab its wheels again but misses, and somehow the wheels crush his hands and have wounded him. He begins to scream, and his lament is not the result of the pain, but in despair at having failed to get hold of the bicycle.
While I am noiselessly watching this silent war, I realize that it is not two children over there, but the insurgent and I who are battling each other; it is we two who are fighting over the bicycle. In our struggle the two wheels have been knocked in two different directions. The whole frame of the bike collapses and is bent out of shape. In our efforts to destroy and split the bicycle even more, the wheels come off in our hands and we wield these against each other too.
“It’s my bicycle!” my son is screaming. The insurgent’s son has grabbed the bike’s handles and is pulling it towards him:
“I’m going to ride it!”
Awakening from the trance where the insurgent and I are fighting each other, I start to become sensible to the likelihood that the quarrel between the two children will be the ruin of the bicycle, and I address my son loudly: “Let your friend ride the bike too, Babu. And stop fighting. Make it up and play.”
***
A bicycle is speeding around a courtyard similar to the one before. Now the insurgent’s son is taking part alongside my son, who is teaching him how to ride. He is learning, on a three-wheeled bicycle, and so he is pedaling hard and making it go fast, and my son is encouraging him from the carrier, shouting “go faster, go faster!” Though this courtyard is a small one the two children handle the bike skillfully and zoom round and round. Riding high in the saddle, the insurgent’s son is giggling and laughing. Behind him, my son is slapping him on the back and jumping about. The jealously and hate seen before in the features of the insurgent’s son are now nowhere to be seen; his face seems to me to be as lovely as my son’s.
The insurgent’s son continues to charge around on the bicycle. Looking at him, I think that if this child were to get the chance to ride a bike like this someday, then he would abandon all of the things learned from his father that went against the norms of childhood – like crawling, lying flat and taking cover; pretending to bomb some helpless group for fun, shouting ‘they’re dead, they’re dead!’ And then I finally realize that the faults of the boy’s father are not his, that they are the teachings in inhumanity that a confused age and a warped state of affairs have compelled him to accept. I look towards the cell. After so many days I see happiness on the face of the insurgent’s wife. Looking at her son and seeing that he is happy, she is smiling.
In my heart, an affection for the boy has begun to grow. After much meditation and reflection I arrive at the conclusion that it is cowardly to blame the insurgent’s wife and son for the crimes he alone has committed. Upon reaching this enlightenment, I decide not to press charges against the boy and his mother and to return them safely to their village.
Three days after sending them back, I get the news that on the second night of their return the insurgent commander came and took his wife and son into the jungle. I am heartbroken by this. How much better it would have been if we had been able to change the future of that insurgent’s son, who is now living in the jungle as a rebel.
Translated byRoss Adkin
[Mahesh Bikram Shah (b. 1965) is one of Nepal’s prominent contemporary writers of short stories. He has, to his credit, seven anthologies of short stories and each of them is a best-seller. His anthology of stories on Nepal’s civil war Chhapamarko Chhoro(Son of a Guerrilla) earned him the prestigious Madan Puraskar in 2007. African Amig, Jackson Height, Sataha, Chhapamarko Chhoro, Sipahiki Swasni, Kathmanduma Comdrade and Bhui Khaa are his other works of fame. Mr. Shah retired from the department of police from the rank of Deputy Inspector General of Police (DIGP) in 2020.]